Add this to the growing list of reasons to be uneasy about your municipal water supply: a new Harvard study has found that six million Americans drink water containing unsafe levels of obscure industrial pollutants associated with cancer and other severe health consequences.

Back in September, researchers in the UK discovered that brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s may be transmissible through certain medical procedures. Skeptical scientists urged caution, but now a different set of autopsy results have shown the same thing.

Internal documents released late Friday show that managers at the Environmental Protection Agency were aware of the potential for a catastrophic “blowout” at Gold King Mine, The Associated Press reports.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was one of the few things the U.S. and the Soviet Union managed to agree on at the height of the Cold War. Among other things, it forbid both nations from bringing space microbes back to Earth, or spreading Earth germs to other planets.

Unless you're a biologist, the bacterium Mycoplasma probably will not strike fear in your heart. Our mouths are teeming with this tiny and usually harmless microbe. But when Mycoplasma finds its way into a petri dish of cells, it becomes a big and expensive headache. A new study finds that 11% of samples in…

Arsenic-contaminated water is a massive problem in the developing world. But, even when you filter it out, the toxic sludge that the process produces often gets dumped right back into the water supply. It's tough to dream up a use for arsenic soup, but one research team finally has: They're making bricks out of it.

Some people go to the beach but eschew going into the water because it's "gross". If that's you, then you are a sucker. According to a new EPA study, playing in the sand more than doubles your chances of getting sick.

Last march when the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant was disastrously damaged by a tsunami, plant technicians used seawater to cool the meltdown situation. At the time, that was probably the best way to avoid an even worse situation.

Well, I guess there's only so much room in that "mega-float," as TEPCO says they'll be dumping over 11,000 tons of Fukushima's iodine-131 contaminated water directly into the Pacific Ocean—enough to potentially expose the public to a quarter of their recommended yearly dose. [BotAS]

Science fiction and fantasy films of the 1980s were filled with a ton of memorable, iconic, and patently ridiculous music. Here are 30+ of the decade's finest (and most painful) movie tunes for your listening pleasure.

Kodos comes to a coffee plantation to lay hundreds of alien eggs, so his offspring can bust out of people Ridley Scott-style. And women can't resist walking towards Kodos' glowing eye. It all leads to the funniest death scene ever.

Being the world's largest beef producer with 55 million cows, Argentinian scientists tested claims about bovines being one of the worst polluters on the planet thanks to the methane they produce. To do this, they used big pink tanks on top of the cows, connected to their intestines with a tube inserted into their rear…